Sherman Alexie Quotes

You'd never know that listening to people in the UN but tribalism is the father of racism.

A Muslim fanatic and a Christian fanatic, a Jewish fanatic, a secular fanatic, an atheist fanatic, a communist fanatic - all of them are the same. The thinking that, 'If you don't think like me, that if you are not with me, then you are against me;' this is something to condemn.

Because we believe that our ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God, is better than your God, we kill each other.

There are many who lust for the simple answers of doctrine or decree. They are on the left and right. They are not confined to a single part of the society. They are terrorists of the mind.

Religion doesn't make people bigots. People are bigots and they use religion to justify their ideology.

In countries where there are no racial differences or no religious differences, people find other reasons to set aside one certain group of people and generally spit in their direction.

We represent the majority of the people in Alabama who hate niggerism, Catholicism, Judaism, and all the isms of the whole world.

The spirit of sect and bigotry has planted its hoof amid the stars. You have only to discuss the problem, whether the stars are inhabited or not, in order to discover it.

I personally am not religious. I think, put into the wrong hands, it's incredibly dangerous. It's the reason for most of the wars that have been fought around the world, and it's pretty ridiculous when you think about what they're actually arguing over.

For me, tribalism and religion are basically the big reasons we're in trouble. Patriotism, tribalism, and religion.

Our enemy is hatred - the hatred inherent in fundamentalism.

There is no religion that has a monopoly on bigotry.

When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies...

Whether that's racism, whether it's bigotry, whether it's gender inequality - whatever it is, it's all stemming from "me against you." And, like, how do you stop it? I just want to do my little part in helping try to stop it.

When people unfortunately use religion to facilitate their envy, arrogance and hate, communalism surfaces.

It appears to be in the nature of religion itself to be prejudiced against those who are different.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

As in political so in literary action a man wins friends for himself mostly by the passion of his prejudices and the consistent narrowness of his outlook.

I'm opposed to fundamentalism in any form.

I don't think people by nature are extremists. You will never find a population of extremists. Extremists have existed throughout the centuries on all religions. And what happens is, extremists start to have more leverage when the situation is bad.

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.

There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

What we need is hatred. From it our ideas are born.

People nearly always believe, and are willing to back it up with weapons and cruelty, that their religion and way of life is better than the other person's.